"Axler, James - Deathlands 021 - Twilight Children - Laurence James 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Axler James)

Now his wristchron said that it was eleven minutes after nine in the morning.

"Think we might be near the sea," J.B. said. "Walls are wet and the air seems damp."

Ryan was first out of the passage, finding himself on a ledge of sculpted rock, barely ten feet wide. To his left there was a steep wall of granite, rising into a thick mist. To the right, the ledge became a trail, winding out of sight.

There were no doors and no sign of anything else that might have been a part of a bigger complex.

"Don't get it," Mildred said. "Anyone could just have walked in and smashed up the gateway. Nothing to stop them."

"Maybe it's so completely isolated that there isn't anyone here. Not even a passing mutie." Ryan bolstered the SIG-Sauer. "Fireblast!"

"What?" Krysty jumped at his loud exclamation.

"Mebbe this a triple-bad hot spot." He checked the tiny rad counter stitched into the sleeve of his coat.

But it showed only a placid, safe green.

J.B. also checked his, finding the same reading. "No hot spot."

"Where are we?" asked Dean. "Looks like the inside of a stickie's ass."

Everyone fell silent, looking around them.

There seemed to be a mist both above and below them, cutting off visibility. The air was cool and moist, the cliffs jagged and irregular, rising all around them. The more Ryan stared, the stranger it all looked. He couldn't find any trace of life anywhere, not even smears of moss or lichen on the boulders.

He scuffed his boots in the dirt, noticing that even the most ubiquitous plant in Deathlands was absent. The tiny multipetaled daisies, with their delicate yellow-and-white coloring, were found from Alaska to the Gulf.

But not here.

"Yeah, J.B.," he said. "Where are we?"

The Armorer fumbled in his pockets and pulled out the microsextant, squinting around the sky. "No sun," he said. "Still, find where light's brightest." After a couple of minutes he shook his head. "Can't get a reading at all. Might be something wrong with this." He put the miniature instrument back in his coat. "Try the compass and see if... Dark night!"

They all gathered around him, seeing that the needle on the magnetic compass was swinging wildly, from north to south, then revolving in a blur of speed, not settling for a moment at any particular point.

"Anomalies," Doc pronounced. "They are known to exist in certain places where the underlying strata contain high proportions of lodestone. Some kind of considerable electromagnetic disturbance."

Michael had walked to the edge and was peering cautiously over the brink. "Can't make out anything. Though... No. I thought I saw something flying through the fog, way below, but it vanished." He hesitated. "Something real big."

Mildred joined the teenager. "Looks to me like the valley of the shadow of death, doesn't it? The land that time forgot. Ultima Thule. End of all things."

There was a puddle of water by Ryan's boots and he stooped and dipped a finger in it, noticing that there was an oily, rainbow sheen on it. He touched his finger to his lips, immediately spitting the substance out

and rubbing his mouth. "Bitter! Tastes like Badwater, down in the heart of Dry Valley."

"Do you think there could have been some kind of chemical pollution here?" Mildred asked. "Not radiation. There was a lot of talk before I got to be ill and got frozen, talk that the Russkies had all sorts of nerve and chemical agents. Nobody knew if it was true. Been some used in the Middle East, in the eighties and nineties. This just looks like some ghastly leakage or spillage of some industrial poison."

"Ow!" Dean slapped at something. "Stung me on the cheek. Look, I got the fucker.' *